Dell Venue 8 Pro and Lightroom

I've recently gotten a Dell Venue 8 pro tablet and wanted to give some feedback on it in regards to lightroom. For those that don't know, this is an 8" windows 8.1 tablet running a quad core Intel Bay Trail (atom) processor with 2gb of ram.

I've been using it for a few days now with Lightroom 5.2 and I'm impressed. Not so much on raw performance, though it does perfectly fine in that regard, but more so for what it does given its size and battery life. I've only pulled in about 25 pictures (Nex 5n ARW's) with it so far, but processing on it is normal. I expected it to feel laggy, but that has not been the case. Most adjustments apply almost immediately, under one second and all of the built in presets (all I've got on there for now) that make multiple changes seem to take only slightly longer (under 2 seconds). Tapping the screen to zoom an image and then waiting for the changes to apply takes about 2-3 seconds, if that. The screen is also pretty nice when you disable the auto brightness. For whatever reason, Dell decided to keep it on the low side (probably for battery). When you adjust it up a little it's a very nice display. It's only 1280x800, but that's not been an issue that I've noticed.

I've been in the habit of carrying a tablet with me when I'm out shooting for a while now. I like to review my shots during breaks and downtime and I think this will be my standard unit from now on. Whatever power it lacks is made up for by the size, weight (.8lbs) and the battery life. Not bad for a $300 (I've seen it as low as $250) device that also includes office.

oh it's worth noting that while (I think) Lightroom 5 isn't optimized for touch, it certainly doesn't suffer for it. I had no issues using the program with my fingers and it seems that all of the side bars (adjustments, presets, catalog, etc) all work perfectly fine by swiping at them. So you don't have to target the scroll bars. I do use an app called touch mouse pointer (http://www.lovesummertrue.com/touchmousepointer/en-us/) that enables an onscreen pointer and disables finger based touch on the desktop for apps that need it, but LR5.2 seems fine as is, at least at this point.